PSYC 2030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Caffeine, Dependent And Independent Variables

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2030
• Professor: Raymond Mar

Document Summary

Experiment refers to a very specific process, a very specific way of doing research, answering a research question. This way is very powerful because it always used to make inferences of causality - main weakness of correlational research, we couldn"t determine causality. Answers the question why - that"s what makes it so powerful. Conditions for causality - how do we know if one thing causes another. But the water has to fall first - cause comes first. Consistency, regularity - everytime we see x, then we see y. If i pour water on the wrong, every time the carpet gets wet. Take advantage of principles of causality. Manipulate/ vary some variable - independent variable - manipulating the cause we are interested in. Control other factors (things we are not interested in) - extraneous variables. Measure some result/ outcome - dependent variable - what is being affected.